Tuckwell - Creation and the function of art techne, poiesis and the problem of aesthetics

Creation and the Function of Art

for Mum and Hayden

Also available from Bloomsbury

Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno

Being and Event, Alain Badiou

The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, Monique Roelofs

Deleuze and the History of Mathematics, Simon B. Duffy

Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze

In the Beginning, She Was, Luce Irigaray

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda

Techne in Aristotles Ethics, Tom Angier

Creation and the Function of Art

Techn, Poiesis and the Problem of Aesthetics

Jason Tuckwell

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

The completion of this book is a testament to the kind support of many people.

First and foremost an inexpressible gratitude to Anthony Uhlmann, without whose unwavering support, knowledge, generosity and encouragement this project would not have been possible. I am also particularly indebted to Ann Finnegan for early mentorship of the project. Many thanks to Diego Bubbio and Alex Ling who provided particular expertise and incisive criticism. I am also indebted to both Gregg Lambert for his early and generous support of the manuscript and Simon Duffy for his thoughtful feedback and suggestions. I thank Richard Garner for his patient and generous sharing of mathematical expertise. To my comrades James Gourley and Ben Denham, I owe particular thanks for friendship, encouragement and intellectual stimulation. I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to the experimental programme at UWS School of Fine Arts, where I forged a predilection for the problematic. I thank my family, Karen, Fred and Nicole, for their interest, generous support and unwavering encouragement. I also owe much gratitude to many other friends and colleagues whose varied and invaluable contributions are too numerous to list. I would additionally like to thank Andrew Wardell at Bloomsbury for his patience and professionalism in bringing the manuscript to publication, as well as James Tupper and the rest of the editorial staff. I would finally like to thank Christopher Connell for his incredible friendship and support in addition to a prolonged and stimulating exchange about the vagaries of artistic praxis.

In our contemporary moment, the orthodox understanding of art arguably comes to us via Platonism and a critique of its metaphysical assumptions. For art, this is to primarily address the poets exile from The Republic by challenging the authority of representation. This is to begin again upon the overturned judgement of mimesis, where art was degraded against the assumption of truths.

Yet, this does not assure a liberation of the power or function of art by a levelling of transcendence onto an immanent or abstract plane. While art variously acquires here new significance, this does not ensure it has been approached as a problem in its own right. More commonly, this is to amplify the uncertainty about art so that it exemplifies the degraded reality of the ideal and the simulated nature of being.

The following work pursues another approach, away from Platonism and the strategy of its overturning. This is to return to Aristotle in order to examine his alternative proposal for mimesis. For Aristotle, art is not a second order imitation, nor a wilful distortion of truths. Art is rather the power of the particular, the power most proximate to nature. Yet what this power imitates is no longer a form it is the action of phusis and the process bringing all to being.

Arguably, Aristotle does not simply propose an alternate mimetic theory, but a very different problematic approach to art. For Aristotle, art techn apprehends a complex problem or topos in which art, nature and creation were thought, together. Let us define the terms of this topos; it is the power to deviate cause from the self-propagating automaticity of phusis. This deviation is marked techn, which serves to indicate art and the distinction of human difference, together. More specifically, techn signals intelligence if not the broader capacity to sense. But that is not all for to deviate or change the direction of phusis requires a capacity to act. Techn is thus a kind of intelligence coupled to action, and the work thereby produced is art or poiesis.

Yet, for our contemporary understanding the terms of this topos are both very broad and specified in a way that has largely lost meaning arguably, this is because the problematic status of techn has become reduced to the series of solutions historically proposed to account for it. We speak of the work of art, but rarely does this evoke a specific accounting of praxis. As such, the problem of work seems largely reducible to what it produces; namely, the finished product or art object, prepared for its commercial or intellectual consumption. However, returning to techn and arts inaugural apprehension is to take up again those problems that have become delegitimized or otherwise abandoned. What is art? What is its relation to the decisive difference of human subjects from other natural beings? And do these broad, generic problems retain any relation to the field of art in its specific disciplinary contexts?

Let us address the fatigue with which this type of questioning is contemporaneously regarded. For this melding of the general and the particular evokes orthodox limits about the very nature of problems. We are told that where problems generate arrays of solutions with largely incompatible or incommensurable results, that this indicates the problem is poorly composed. Let us draw out the implicit principle here: problems are thought to be inherently tied to solutions, and so much so, that the value of a problem often concerns how well it anticipates its own resolution.

Yet, there is another way to think of problems: the problem remains irreducible to the series of solutions it produces. As such, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a problem and a solution. Rather problems are approached via their inherently productive and generative properties they create and disgorge differences. From this perspective there would be no corresponding solution to the problem of techn; to return to it as the problematic would rather constitute the attempt to comprehend its irreducibly creative power. This is not to reassert the rather glib platitude that art must be anything whatsoever it is to inquire whether it is an irreducibly generative activity that resists a definitive resolution, be it ontological, sensible, material or theoretical. And because techn problematizes art and human difference together, this questions whether the process of particularization constitutes a resolution into subjective being. That is to say, if techn concerns an irresolvable, generative activity, this calls into question whether any determinations about subjective beings also determines what kind of work they can perform.

In order to encounter the work of art on its own terms, the following discussion opens upon the nature of the problematic. This is to begin with Deleuzes characterization of two kinds of problems in philosophical inquiry. The first is the general form with which we are very familiar, in which all problems are coupled to solutions. But from this dominant form, Deleuze distinguishes a difference in kind: a separate sense of the